


The Saddest Word Is My Name

by makbaes (gentlemindedlostgirl)



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Ambiguous Relationships, Depression, Disordered Eating, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Friends to Lovers, Graduate School, Light Angst, Literary References & Allusions, Literature, M/M, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-18
Updated: 2019-05-18
Packaged: 2020-03-07 14:29:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18875080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gentlemindedlostgirl/pseuds/makbaes
Summary: If Ten was asked, he couldn’t pinpoint an exact moment when the sadness had stopped being loud and just started being background noise so comforting he didn’t even realize it was playing on loop. Probably around the time he woke up in Doyoung’s bed and realized he wasn’t just there for sex anymore. He was a Romantic. Capital R. Love wasn’t supposed to matter much to him. He was meant to relish in the mere aesthetic decadence, live only for what would satisfy him in a moment and not think about tomorrow. If you asked Ten how that was working for him, he would say that he was doing just fine. He was being Oscar Wilde, Lord Byron, all of the ridiculous, flamboyant writers he tried to emulate.In truth, Ten wasn’t sure it had ever worked for him





	The Saddest Word Is My Name

**Author's Note:**

> This is also part of my literature students universe, the first au of which can be found on my twitter @hufflepuffchnle! But you don't gotta read that to understand this.

_ Goodbye is the saddest word I know _

_ The saddest word you know is my name.  _

 

Ten wakes up twenty minutes before his alarm rings. He blinks at his ceiling, the flourescent light of his desk lamp being the first thing that greets him. He hasn’t slept in the complete dark in six months. He doesn’t know what would happen if he turned the light off. He doesn’t want to find out. 

Long exhale. He closes his eyes again and tries to convince himself that the twenty minute power nap is worth it--he sleeps so little these days, he should take up every chance for it that he gets. But it’s a fruitless endeavor and he knows it, so after a five minute battle with sleep, he turns over and opts to scroll through social media instead. Ten minutes of watching people dramatize on Instagram and he can feel the familiar nausea settle into the pit of his stomach. Perfect. He didn’t want breakfast anyway. It means the cereal will stretch out longer and he doesn’t get paid until next week. 

It’s quiet when he sits up. It always is in the mornings, students are nocturnal by nature, he knows that the noise doesn’t usually begin until after dinner and won’t cease until sunrise. He could call in a noise complaint but his mother taught him to choose his battles and he refuses to let a group of people know that they’re getting to him--especially since he knew them all. They were good people, he’d even go so far as to say he liked them. They were just loud. And they didn’t know they were loud. 

Ten likes his quiet. Which meant that morning was his favorite time of day. He could take his time in the mornings and not have to worry about running into anybody. Not that he planned on leaving his room for the entire day--an electric kettle was a magical thing. It meant he could use his french press to make coffee and if he was  _ truly  _ pressed to eat, he had plenty of instant noodles and granola bars to keep him satiated. 

He padded out of bed and over to where he kept his kettle--still full from when he had filled it the night before. His hands move in tired routine to prepare his coffee and when it’s brewing, he takes a sharp inhale in through the nose. It’s a placebo effect, the way he feels that the smell of coffee wakes him up, but he’ll take it. He’s got work to do, and he doesn’t want to do any of it, but his body will mechanically type out papers and emails whether his brain wants him to or not. 

Ten rubs his eyes with the heels of his palms as he thinks about all of the things he has to do today, and tomorrow, and a week from now, and a month from now, and every day until he’ll die, and his heart races as he shakes his head. He tries to remember what his therapist told him--one day at a time. One hour at a time. He doesn’t have to worry about the term paper that’s due Monday or the exam he has in two weeks. Not right now. Those moments will come and go, his due dates will arrive, and his work will get done. 

_ Byron isn’t going to read himself,  _ Ten mumbled to no one as he poured the coffee into the biggest mug he owned and settled down at his desk. He liked his roommates plenty, but he relished in the fact that his bedroom, these four walls, were his and his alone. It meant that he could sit with his knees up to his chest as  _ Don Juan _ sat on his desk and his eyes scanned over the pages he had read a hundred thousand times beforehand. He had long passed the point where reading it again revealed something he hadn’t noticed the first time. He figured he could recite the cantos from memory. Now when he read, he was mechanical, looking for the specific passages he knew would get him brownie points with whatever professor he was reading it and what their particular agenda with the poem was. 

When someone asked Ten what the most important thing he learned from his studies was, he would say  _ adaptability  _ quickly. People laughed at that response, but it was the truth. He had to learn how to get a feel for every new professor he had, what they liked, what they didn’t, and then adapt his writing to that. He envied people in STEM fields most days--no matter what your professor’s opinions of a subject were, one plus one still equalled two. But if you professor was a homophobe and you wrote a paper about Nick Carroway being gay, you might get a failing grade due to “lack of textual evidence”. 

So he would say he’s gotten pretty good at moulding himself to the expectations of others. It’s come in handy on more than one occasion. This professor is no exception--the bane of Ten’s existence, but the only one teaching a required course for his degree. He fundamentally disagrees with everything the man has ever said, but he knows how to make his research paper  _ sound  _ like the two of them were cut from the same cloth.

He’s two hours, a cup and a half of coffee, and six pages into his paper when his phone rings and Doyoung’s picture lights up his screen. It’s an old photo, he really needs to update it. It’s from last year, when they were just starting their masters and they were still excited about the idea of academia--you’d think they’d have remembered how beat down they’d felt after their senior year of undergrad. Doyoung’s hair is shorter and despite it only having been a year, he looks so much younger. Maybe it’s the circles that aren’t yet under his eyes or the bright smile on his face, gummy and carefree with the help of a couple of shots of Titos. 

Ten almost doesn’t answer. He’s mad at Doyoung and he has no right to be, which only makes him angrier. Ten and Doyoung aren’t dating, so it’s not technically a problem that Doyoung made some comment about how hot and flirtatious this poetry student that started working in the writing center is. ( _ Poets are overrated,  _ Ten would tell him as he smacked him with his copy of Don Juan.  _ Hasn’t Byron taught you anything?)  _ But it  _ did  _ make him mad. Doyoung should have known better than to say something like that while Ten was in the room and still covered in his bruises. 

He answers anyway, because he’s a sadist that’s never known what’s good for him. 

“When’s the last time you left your apartment?” Doyoung asks in lieu of a greeting. 

“Good afternoon to you too,” Ten huffs as he scrolls through JSTOR to try and find  _ someone  _ that wrote  _ anything  _ that he could even vaguely twist to support his argument. “I’m having a  _ great  _ day, thanks for asking. I’m being very productive and my roommates are still sleeping.”

He says it because Doyoung doesn’t want to hear the answer (four days--and this is probably the first time he’s used his actual voice to talk to someone and didn’t just text them in pushing thirty hours) and because he’s still mad at him and wants to make his life a little more difficult. It’s childish, but it’ll get the desired effect. 

“You’re upsetting Mom,” Doyoung countered.

Ten rolled his eyes before remembered that Doyoung couldn’t see. “Kun will get over himself. He’s got Yukhei to keep him busy, and he’s a handful.”

“When was the last time you ate something that wasn’t full of sodium and came from a packet?”

“Now you  _ sound  _ like Kun, and it’s not a cute look on you,” Ten said, only partially listening as he continued scrolling through sources (one day he’d stop making his life hard and he’d pick the  _ easy  _ topics of writing that  _ definitely  _ had sources. This wasn’t one of those times). 

“Meet me at Lovie’s in thirty,” Doyoung said before hanging up the phone. 

Ten wanted to call him back and point out how austentatious it was of him to simply assume that Ten would drop everything--the research that he was working so  _ hard  _ on--just to meet up with him. He wanted to crawl back into bed just to prove a point. 

Instead, he put on jeans for the first time in nearly a week, brushed his teeth, and left his apartment. 

Cafe Lovelace was located in a prime location--centrally between their apartments and the university, and therefore made a frequent hangout spot for the stressed out graduate students--later with the additions of Sicheng and Yukhei. The coffee was a little pricier than you would get if you went to the student union, but the sheer taste made up for it. And they had the best pastries Ten had ever had, and Doyoung’s always been a fan of their paninis. There’s a piano and a guitar in the back that was available for any passerby, and Kun would sometimes strum at the guitar while Doyoung poked at the piano. They’d tried to egg Ten along to sing, but Ten decidedly refused to be a part of a family band. 

In short, it was one of Ten’s favorite places in the world. Which was precisely why he didn’t want to go in that moment. He didn’t want this place to ever be associated with the heaviness that was currently weighing down his shoulders. 

Doyoung was already sitting at their table--the one that they didn’t technically own, of course, but they might as well have given how much time they spent there. Other regulars knew better than to try and take it from them or else endure Ten’s dirty glares. Doyoung was picking at his turkey pesto panini, his usual mocha by his side. Sitting across from him was a chocolate croissant and Ten didn’t even have to take a sip of the drink to know it was a bonfire latte, Ten’s drink of choice. God damn him. 

“When Doctor Marsh doesn’t get his paper on how Haidee and Juan are basically Dido and Aeneas, I’m going to make a note that it’s your fault. I hope you can sleep well knowing you’re going to be the reason I flunk that class.”

“You’re going to flunk that class because Doctor Marsh follows twentieth century literary criticism and you like to hypostatize, not because I bought you coffee,” Doyoung said before taking a sip of his mocha, not looking up from his phone screen.

“Well you’re not  _ helping,”  _ Ten asserted. His stomach churned as he looked down at the croissant. He couldn’t remember the last time he felt hungry. This wasn’t because he’d eaten plenty in the last few weeks--his diet mainly consisted of Kind bars, instant ramen, and peanut butter sandwiches. But his body didn’t know what to do when it got food now, so he existed mainly in a vague state of nausea that he’d learned to deal with. It was so easy not to eat these days that he just kind of...didn’t. 

“Kun wanted to stage an intervention with everyone, and I mean  _ everyone,  _ Sicheng and Yukhei included, but I stopped him,” Doyoung said, setting down his phone and finally looking back up at Ten. “But you look like shit. You don’t talk to anyone anymore. What the hell is going on with you?”

“Has anyone ever told you that you have a way with words, Doyoung?” Ten asked, leaning forward and resting his chin in his hand. “You just know how to make a guy feel like the most special thing in the world.”

Doyoung closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “Can you cut the crap for five minutes? Please? For once?” His voice teetered on the edge of shaking, and it was the first time Ten considered the fact that he might be causing the other legitimate pain. 

The truth of the matter was that Ten didn’t know what he was doing, or what was wrong with him, or how to get out of it. Or for that matter, if he even  _ wanted  _ to get out of it. Sometimes he felt in too deep to go back. If he was asked, he couldn’t pinpoint an exact moment when the sadness had stopped being loud and just started being background noise so comforting he didn’t even realize it was playing on loop. Probably around the time he woke up in Doyoung’s bed and realized he wasn’t just there for sex anymore. 

Ten was a Romantic. Capital R. Love wasn’t supposed to matter much to him. He was meant to relish in the mere aesthetic decadence, live only for what would satisfy him in a moment and not think about tomorrow. If you asked Ten how that was working for him, he would say that he was doing just fine. He was being Oscar Wilde, Lord Byron, all of the ridiculous, flamboyant writers he tried to emulate. 

In truth, Ten wasn’t sure it had  _ ever  _ worked for him. Maybe his first year of undergrad, when he was still in the process of inventing himself, finding his friends and his footing. Back then, when it had just been him and Kun at first and they were partying every weekend, it was the best. Ten could manage to get trashed, hook up with people and not remember their names the next day, and  _ still  _ managed a 3.5 GPA. Jaehyun was added to their circle during their Sophomore year of undergrad. Sicheng came into the picture junior year. 

Doyoung joined them the first year of their masters. By this point, the Wildean image of a Ten who didn’t care about anything other than worldly pleasures was well known to be a facade--at least to those who knew Ten well, even if Ten would never admit to it out loud. Since Doyoung was the last person to be added to their little family--before Yukhei came around, that is--he was also the last person to find out that Ten was made up ninety eight percent of performance. 

So it had been easy. At first. When their hooking up was drunken haze, gasping in the dark, names whispered like litanies of prayers. Doyoung thought, back then, that this  _ was  _ Ten. He hadn’t known him long enough to consider the fact that he needed to read Ten like he read Whitman--more than one, between the lines, paying careful attention to every punctuation. 

Kun would assert himself as being the leading scholar in Understanding Ten. Out of their current circle of friends, he had certainly been studying the longest. Doyoung was only finishing up his second year. But Kun had never been good at the nuance that Ten required. Kun tried to tackle things upfront, all at once, brought emotions into things and acted in ways that overwhelmed Ten and caused him to shut down. It wasn’t a fault of Kun’s--he just didn’t know how to do things differently. 

Doyoung knew better, or he hoped he did by now. If he didn’t, this entire day was about to crumble beneath him. He pushed the plate with the croissant closer to Ten. “You’re giving yourself non-diabetic hypoglycemia.”

“You’re sexy when you talk like a scientist,” Ten hummed. He knew Doyoung had just begged him not to be like this, but Ten wasn’t really sure he knew how to be any different anymore. 

“Low blood sugar. It’s why you feel sick all the time. Chocolate will give you a boost. Jumpstarts the system. You’ll actually have the energy to work on your novel.”

Ten winced. The novel was a sore subject for him and Doyoung knew that. They were literature students--all of them had tried to write a novel at one point. Or a play, or collection of poetry, whatever seemed to strike their fancy at a particular moment only to be surely abandoned in a month’s time. But Ten had been working on this project, a period piece that he used to agonize over, since he was eighteen. But the perfectionist in him would never be satisfied with. He hadn’t opened the document in three months. He claimed it was because He was taking a step back, he needed time away so he could look back at it with fresh eyes. Anyone that could see him wasting away knew better. 

He brought the croissant to his lips and took a bite anyway. They sat in silence for a little while as Ten took slow, careful bites. Ten tried to just enjoy the pastry--one he ordered nearly every other time he came to this place in the past. He had a small rotation of treats he went through, but this had always been one of his favorites. Now it just went down like a rock, sitting in the tempestuous malease of his stomach. 

When he was finished, Doyoung finally looked him in the eye again. “We joked last year how we all kinda fit into the tropes of our specializations,” he started as he stirred his coffee. “Jaehyun and Sicheng did their little Darcy and Lizzie dance around each other--”

“More like Bingley and Jane,” Ten scoffed. 

“Point stands,” Doyoung shrugged. “Kun waxes poetic and is all clever and witty and  _ way  _ dirtier than people think he is when they first talk to him. If I get drunk and see a nice tree, I get a little emotional.” He reached across the table and took Ten’s hand in his. Ten had more than half a mind to take it away, but he couldn’t bring himself to actually do it. “You don’t... _ have  _ to be Byronic. You can ask for help sometimes. You can let us...let  _ me  _ take care of you.”

“I can take care of myself just fine,” he said, finally pulling his hand away.

Doyoung scoffed. “Oh yeah, you’re doing a bang-up job of it right now. You’ve lost fifteen pounds this semester, Ten. You’re skin and bones. Professor Lee asked me if you’re okay. He’s worried about you. We’re  _ all  _ worried about you. I know you think it’s sexy to pretend like you’re Wilde reincarnate, but it’s going to kill you one of these days.”

“Worse ways to go,” Ten said, taking a long sip of the coffee and avoiding Doyoung’s gaze. He knew that the day was going to go this way--Doyoung had been walking him into a trap and Ten had gone willingly. 

“What the hell’s the matter with you?” Doyoung asked, actual pain in his voice now, which gave Ten pause. “You’re  _ scaring  _ me.”

The matter was that Ten had no idea what he was doing with his life. He wasn’t going for a PhD like Kun was, he didn’t have a fancy job at a publishing house lined up like Doyoung did,  he wasn’t “engaged to be engaged” like Jaehyun was with Sicheng. He was just. Stuck. Trapped. Scrambling to find work anywhere that would pay the rent even if he was overqualified and it wasn’t in his field. He didn’t even know what a dream job for him would  _ look  _ like, let alone how he would find it. And that made him feel lost, and like nothing he was doing actually mattered, so he just..let himself coast through. If he could act like he didn’t care about any of it, maybe the anxiety that always itched below the surface of his skin might actually go away. It hadn’t yet. He could hope. 

He couldn’t vocalize that. So he slumped his shoulders and shook his head. “I don’t know,” he replied, and it was the closest thing to the truth he had said all day. 

“Whatever it is, you don’t have to go through it alone,” Doyoung asserted. “Let me make you dinner tonight. A  _ real  _ dinner. With actual protein and  _ healthy  _ fats.”

“Don’t push your vegan nonsense onto me,” Ten said, scrunching up his face in only vaguely mock disgust. 

“I’ll make fish,” Doyoung said, rolling his eyes. “We’ll get cookies from here and bring them to mine, warm them in the microwave and put them on ice cream.”

“You don’t have to try and seduce me like this, I’m already sleeping with you,” Ten replied, though he smiled for the first time in a few days. 

“You’ll only get sex if you behave,” Doyoung said, pointing an accusatory spoon in his direction. “You have to promise that whatever this bullshit is?” he said, waving his spoon in a circle at Ten. “It’s over. It’s exhausting for everyone involved, and it’ll be so much easier for all of us, yourself included, if you just start taking care of yourself and let us fucking  _ help  _ you.”

Ten opened his mouth to protest, to resort to some witty quip or Byronic platitude to fall back on and avoid talking about the fact that he was hurting and that Doyoung, bless him, was part of the problem because as far as Ten was concerned, they could never be any more than  _ this  _ but more was the only thing Ten wanted. Instead, he closed his mouth and nodded before letting out a quiet “okay.”

“You have to promise,” Doyoung said, leaning over the table, his breath a gross combination of chocolate and pesto and Ten didn’t even care for a moment because his eyes were light again and there was a hint of a smile crossing his face. 

Ten would promise an awful lot of things he didn’t mean just to keep seeing that smile grow. “I promise,” he whispered, edging closer to Doyoung, his eyes fluttering closed with the promise of a kiss. 

Doyoung didn’t keep him wanting. He never did. They couldn’t truly indulge themselves here in the middle of the cafe, but the quick, chaste kiss was enough to keep Ten going for the time being. He’d hold on tight to whatever he could take. 

“Come on, we’re being too nauseating for the general public right now,” Doyoung said, standing up and clearing his area. “Come back to mine. You can work on your paper there.”

“I can’t help that I’m so blatantly irresistible,” Ten said, letting Doyoung wrap an arm around his waist as they left the coffee shop. “But...thanks. For letting me stay over. I’ll be on my best behavior,” he said with a bright grin. “I’ll even make you coffee.”


End file.
